A Southern Family - Godwin

I fully intend to pay attention to those spiritual books waiting to be read for Lent, but I’ve been distracted too much by a couple everlasting tomes by Gail Godwin, A Southern Family and A Mother and Two Daughters. My sister was the one who inspired me to pick up one of her books, but she read something different. I read A Southern Family first. The plot held my attention, but I kept thinking I should put it down. It’s long. I didn’t really love the characters. It has a sort of romance novel sweepingness about it, almost feels as if it seems to think it is a better book than it is. But each time I was ready to dump it in the library return bag, I’d come across a passage like the conversation between a couple of the central characters, Clare Quick, a novelist, and her best friend Julia, a history professor, that starts out being about Clare’s family but turns into a discussion of power. After talking about fame, wealth, beauty, and perseverance, Julia comments, “There is always, I suppose, the power base of a secret, inviolate, spiritual life.” Ahh, this could get good I thought.

That conversation ends with the two friends admiring the flight of a hawk who casts a shadow, which seems to presage the tragedy awaiting the two friends later that day. Clare’s brother Theo shoots himself and his girlfriend in front of his girlfriend’s son. The rest of the book revolves around the way the various Quick family members make sense of this tragedy and make judgments of each other. The narrative perspective switches from character to character, so the reader is given different insights into the family members and sees how complex their responses are compared to the judgments of the others, but I ended up feeling unattached to any of them. They suffer from what Clare notices about characters in a book she’s reading about southern families: they have “a stubborn loyalty to [their] sadness. … - a sort of elegiac mourning for the loss of a world that never had been … They were in love with their sadness more than with one another. Their sadness had become their religion and their art: it provided, as music to a dance, the tempo and structure of their lives.”


Perhaps the character I liked the most was Julia, Clare’s friend and subject of one of her books. Julia leaves a promising job, and a wealthy husband, to attend to duty by coming home to take care of her dying mother and then her lonely, aging father. She is able to escape becoming a bitter and mean old woman by “her historian’s awareness” of all that goes on around her, including “the striking aesthetic deterioration” going on around her town, as well as in families like the Quicks.

Another part of what kept me reading was interest in the southern culture. This book came out in 1987, well before “Southern lit” was used to describe books about Sweet Potato Queens, food made with butter and the help that made it, and sassy ladies with plastic surgery, so it draws on the “southern lit” tradition surrounding tortured families whose influence is lost and their dying civilization in which duty and nobility are no longer admired virtues. The influx of suburban tract homes and the lessening of the distance between the “hill people” and the people in town in this small Tennessee community seemed familiar, similar to the changes experienced in the small midwestern town where I grew up. In fact the setting seemed more reminiscent of that Midwestern town than it did of the southern town where I live now, although I more than once have heard politically incorrect remarks, sometimes startlingly off-color ones, about people of different races or who live in the country here.


Also familiar was the run-down cottage Clare rents on an island two states over and invites all the family to visit. Clare looks through all the books and photos of the owners in an effort to know them. My own family used to rent a lake house for a week or 10 days every summer up in Michigan. Most of the cottages’ shelves were stocked with Reader’s Digest Condensed books and a few romances. One had a stash of magazines and comics from the 60s and an old guest book in which our names were repeated over the years. We could copy the appreciative comments of other guests and think ourselves creative.

At the lake house, everything gets wrapped up: the family members are able to come to an acceptable peace and move on with life. Clare and her mother share dream stories. The mother is able to see something beautiful in the fake flowers left at son’s grave by his hill country wife. The father survives eye surgery and seems to have a new perspective on life. Clare has a new story to begin.


Early in the book, Clare’s dead brother had criticized her for writing books that ended with everyone happy and successful. Clare, sensitive to this criticism, threw out the book she was working on when her brother dies, because it is the sort of thing she thought she ought to be writing. Her lover, Felix, says at one point, “An artist has found his true subject, I think, when he dramatizes the truth he can no longer escape rather than the illusions he has been longing to make true.” So perhaps Godwin wants us to believe that Theo’s death somehow liberates Clare from the desire to free herself from her family, and instead to try to look at each one more as an individual she accepts.


So perhaps that’s the Lenten lesson to be drawn from this book: Love others as they are as you love yourself as you are, instead of trying to make people into who you want them to be.


The theme of A Mother and Two Daughters is similar, but I have to admit I skimmed this one. I was just going to peek into it a little to see if it were worth reading, since I am a mother of two daughters and a daughter of a mother of two daughters and am interested in sisterly relations. I read enough to want to find out what happened to the characters, but also enough to not want to spend days reading it. Instead I spent a couple hours breezing through the pages, but didn’t find any passages that made me want to linger. I’m sure it’s a likable book for someone in the right mood, but it struck me as low on substance, high on relativism.


Now I am on to something meatier: I started the book about biblical figures by the local priest, am keeping up with the Magnificat Lenten Companion (kept in a convenient spot in the W.C.), and finally started A Winter’s Tale, which may be sidetracked by an attempt to assimilate as much Western Lit from the Norton Anthology as I can before I start a new class next week. After suffering from an oppressive sense of failure at the end of last semester when I wasn’t offered another class at the community college, I have been given a second chance. This class is a condensed version at the Navy base and meets two nights a week for 3 hours. I don’t have time to dither about what selections to read or to fret much about my shortcomings. I’m hoping the literature will speak for itself.